Clive Barker's Jericho

We report on yet another disturbance in the Middle East

There’s no I in team. Well, there used to be - but you died. It was really quite sad. You were there one moment, standing in a lost city packed with demons and screaming at the top of your lungs, and then you were dead. Just another rugged action hero vastly experienced in supernatural warfare popping his cork at the hands of something horrible: Gone but not forgotten.

But wait: Much like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, you’ve come back from the very brink of death. Although there’ll be no clay-sex shenanigans for you, oh no. In Jericho, it’s all about leaping between the minds of your military cohorts, combining their prodigious paranormal powers and turning the poor denizens of Al-Khali into a bloody pulp. Al-Khali itself seems OK on the surface - just another everyday Middle-Eastern city really - one that’s built on the exact spot that every few thousand years pure evil forces itself through a temporal rift and sits upon the face of the earth.

Triggered by black spots of history - the gluttony of the Roman Empire, the mass-killings of The Crusades and the warfare and genocide enacted by Germany’s National Socialist party - every time this terrifying temporal sandstorm whips up around the city, a different version of it has been taken back into the dimension from whence it came, occupants and all. Left there for eons, the swallowed-up soldiers have had a lot of time to reconstruct their fleshy bits and brain chemistry, and it’s their layers of history you must traverse as your team makes its way to the heart of its evil.

From an Al-Khali bombed and battered by the ravages of WWII, through to the “Arabian Nights” confines known by the medieval knights you see displayed here and the early days of Roman occupation, Jericho is as much an adventure in archaeology as it is piles of dead bodies that have achieved consciousness.

The first people to open the rift between dimensions through their nastiness, meanwhile, were the Sumerians - who sit at the center of this bloody maze and who, Wikipedia informs us, “were brought fully formed to the city of Eridu by their god Enki or by Abgallu the Oannes of Berossus.” What they probably didn’t believe was that it’s all their fault that The Box, or more specifically “The Pyxsis” - the undying corrupted dimension inhabited by the source of all evil, got opened in the first place. Damn Sumerians.